I am new to Webwork, converting classes from Pearson's MyMathLab. In my course, as soon as an assignment opens it is graded as a zero, even if the students hasn't ever opened it. MyMathLab calls this the "Cumulative Performance." I would like to have all assignments available to the students, but if they haven't worked the assignment it doesn't count against their grade. MyMathLab calls this the "Current Average." Is there a way to calculate scores using the current average in Webwork?
Are you concerned about what grades students see for themselves in WeBWorK? Or what grades you will manually port over to some other grade management tool? Or something involving grade passback to an LMS?
In any case WeBWorK does not currently record whether or not a student has visited a set. There is not a way to know if they never opened it versus they opened it, looked at the exercises, worked hard for hours, but never submitted any answers. That would be a matter of adding a boolean to the database table for each set for each student.
Maybe once upon a time I had something similar to what you describe going, but augmented with an Excel template. I would use Scoring Tools to get a .csv of all the grades, and paste it into Excel. I had some fancy Excel commands to calculate averages, but leave some cells out of the calculation. For me it was to drop their worst set from the averaging.
In the past the developers responded to questions like yours is that there is no plan to make WeBWorK an LMS.
My students and other instructors using WeBWorK constantly complain about the grades showing up as zero.
For reference: We are using Blackboard for calculating grade averages, including the grades that are synced from WeBWorK. Blackboard calls average calculation that omits
assignments that has no attempts "running total". You could set up homework assignment links one-by-one and that would do calculation the way you would like. Probably there are similar settings on other LMS platforms.
"running total" calculation bothers me,
because some students don't even look at the homework and I
have to manually zero out their grades if running total is set, or their average is not correct.
On the other hand if a student follows an assignment link in Blackboard and looks at it on WeBWorK without entering any answer, a zero grade will sync to Blackboard, which also results in complaints.